Volume 49, Number 18 · November 21, 2002
Bad Trip
By Dan Jacobson
Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard
by Sara Wheeler
Random House, 354 pp., $26.95
The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Expedition
by Susan Solomon
Yale University Press, 383 pp., $29.95
Imagine you have been given the task of organizing an expedition to an uninhabited and almost wholly unmapped part of the globe, where conditions are as hostile to human survival as anything below the highest peaks in the Himalayas. Imagine that while you are there you will have no means of communicating with the outside world from one year's end to the next; that your central task will be the completion of a 1,800-mile march across snow and broken ice; and that during the march you will have to man-haul sledge-weights of anything up to 200 pounds per person, and go up and down a glacier running for 80 miles between sea level and an altitude of 10,000 feet. Knowing all this to be ahead of you, would you choose as one of your companions a wholly inexperienced twenty-four-year-old who is so shortsighted he sees people across the road as nothing more than 'vague blobs walking'? (Yes, he does wear spectacles to correct his vision; but in the regions you are going to his lenses will be constantly iced over by his own breath.) And would you also include in your party another man who carries a war wound that has left him with one leg an inch and a half shorter than the other?
Review, 4491 words
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